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When Ads Go Wandering
conq writes "BusinessWeek explores yet another click fraud scam, this one utilizing Yahoo!'s ads." From the article: "Somewhere along the way, an ad can wander off this trail. This happens when one of Yahoo's partners decides to give its own partners a cut in return for traffic, Edelman says. According to the study, a Yahoo partner called Ditto.com served an Overture advertisement through another site, NBCSearch (no affiliation with General Electric's NBC), unaffiliated with Yahoo. That company, in turn, passed it along to one of its own partners. (NBCSearch didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.) When that happens, Yahoo can't track its ads. Sometimes, the ads show up in undesirable places, like a pop-up from a spyware program. The average user simply sees the pop-up, unaware of how many networks it traversed beforehand."
That is unquestionably the most incomprehensible article summary I've ever read. What?
Presumably one of these 'associates' is forcing a click on one of the original yahoo ads so they pay their aassociate, who pays their associate who pays their associate?
:) And I know my figures suck (and you shouldn't start sentences with 'and'), but hopefully this makes sense.
Seems weird. OK lets assume yahoo are paying 1 dollar per click from one of their associates (I know this is WAY more, but I'm not going to work through figures with thousanths of pennies!). Their associates pay 50 cents to one of THEIR associates who pays 25 cents to another who (through spam) forces yahoo to pay for an extra million clicks. That means they get 250,000 (if I can add up - it's late and I was down the pub earlier!)
So it seems that all the associates gain and yahoo lose (from TFA costing the company roughly $6.7 million in revenue). I think the problem is ANY of the associates gain to stand so they have no idea which one could be doing it.
At least that is how I read the article, but please re-read my line about being tired and drunk
If each associate has 4 others the cash is diluted through all the associates (who all have the incentive of extra cash to not bother investigating to much) and suddenly with only 3 or 4 links down you have hundreds of possible companies that did it and that is presumably why Yahoo are having such a problem tracking it down.